MegaETH Launches Its Token With a Business Model, Not Just a Chain

On the day of MegaETH's token generation event, co-founders Shuyao and Lei joined Bankless to explain why they designed the launch differently from most crypto projects. Rather than distributing tokens to insiders with no strings attached, they tied token unlocks to verifiable KPIs—a deliberate break from industry convention. "I found it really odd that insiders can just get 60% or 50% of a protocol's token at launch without doing much or metrics to prove that they've done the work," Shuyao said. "The old game is not worth playing anymore."

Building Public, Not Playing the Old Game

The KPI structure required ten genuinely novel applications to go live on MegaETH before the token could launch. The team deliberately excluded standard deployments like Aave or Uniswap. Instead, they curated apps that "can't exist anywhere else," as Shuyao put it. The most prominent is World Markets (WCM), a fully on-chain centralized exchange with no backend—the protocol itself serves as the backend, and anyone can deploy a frontend. "It took the team five years to build it," Shuyao noted. Other apps include Hit One, a retail-oriented trading interface, and Bricks, which tokenizes emerging market yield opportunities.